Between the freeway
and the gray conning towers
of the ballpark, miles
of mostly vacant lots, once
a neighborhood of small
two-storey wooden houses—
dwellings for immigrants
from Ireland, Germany,
Poland, West Virginia,
Mexico, Dodge Main.
A little world with only
three seasons, or so we said—
one to get tired, one to get
old, one to die.
No one puts in irises,
and yet before March passes
the hard green blades push
their way through
where firm lawns once were.
The trunks of beech and locust
darken, the light new branches
take the air. You can
smell the sticky sap rising
in the maples, smell it
even over the wet stink
of burned houses.
On this block seven houses
are still here to be counted,
and if you count the shacks
housing illegal chickens,
the pens for dogs, the tiny
pig sty that is half cave...
and if you count them you can
count the crows’ nest
in the high beech tree
at the corner, and you can
regard the beech tree itself
bronzing in mid–morning light
as the mast of the great ship
sailing us all back
into the 16th century
or into the present age’s
final discovery. (Better
perhaps not to speak
of final anything, for
this place was finally retired
the books thrown away
when after the town exploded
in ‘67 these houses
were plundered for whatever
they had. Some burned
to the ground, some
hung open, doorless, wide-eyed
until hauled off
by the otherwise unemployable
citizens of the county
to make room for the triumphant
return of Mad Anthony Wayne
Pere Marquette, Cadillac,
the badger, the wolverine,
the meadow lark, the benign
long toothed bi-ped
with nothing on his mind.)
During baseball season
the neighborhood’s thriving
business for anyone
who can make change
and a cardboard sign
that reads “Parking $3.”
He can stand on the curb
directing traffic and pretend
the land is his.
On mid-August nights I come
out here after ten
and watch the light rise
from the great gray bowl
of the stadium, watch it catch
a scrap of candy wrapper
in the wind, a soiled napkin
or a peanut shell and turn
it into fire or the sound
of fire as the whole world
holds its breath. In the last
inning 50,000
pulling at the night
air for one last scream.
They can drain the stars
of light. No one
owns any of this.
It’s condemned,
but the money for the execution
ran out three years ago.
Money is a dream, part
of the lost past.
Joe Louis grew up a few miles
east of here and attended
Bishop Elementary.
No one recalls
a slender, dumbfounded
boy afraid of his fifth grade
home room teacher. Tom Jefferson
—“Same name as the other one”—
remembers Joe at seventeen
all one sweltering summer
unloading bales of rags
effortlessly from the trucks
that parked in the alley
behind Wolfe Sanitary Wiping Cloth.
“Joe was beautiful,”
is all he says, and we two
go dumb replaying Joe’s
glide across the ring
as he corners Schmeling
and prepares to win
World War II. Like Joe
Tom was up from Alabama,
like Joe he didn’t talk
much then, and even now
he passes a hand across
his mouth when speaking
of the $5 day that lured
his father from the cotton fields
and a one room shack the old folks
talked about until
they went home first
to visit and later to die.
Suggested Reading
In Warsaw
By Elisa Gonzalez“It is several years since this dinner, and I remember best the taste of persimmons soaked in muscadet.”
The Daily
Dinner Parties
The Art of Fiction No. 86
By John Barth
This interview with John Barth was conducted in the studios of KUHT in Houston, Texas, for a series entitled The Writer in Society. The stage set was made up to resemble a writer’s den—the decor including a small globe of the world, bronze Remington-like animal statuary, a stand-up bookshelf with glass shelves on which were placed some potted plants and a haphazard collection of books, a few volumes of the Reader’s Digest condensed novel series among them. Large pots of plants were set about. Barth sat amongst them in a cane chair. He is a tall man with a domed forehead; a pair of very large-rimmed spectacles give him a professorial, owlish look. He is a caricaturist’s delight. He sports a very wide and straight mustache. Recently he had grown a beard. In manner, Barth has been described as a combination of British officer and Southern gentleman.
“We’ll have to stick to the channel,” he wrote in his first novel, The Floating Opera, “and let the creeks and coves go by.” Every novel since then has been a refutation of this dictum of sticking to the main topic. He is especially influenced by the classical cyclical tales such as Burton’s Thousand and One Nights and the Gesta Romanorum, and by the complexities of such modern masters as Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett. For novels distinguished by a wide range of erudition, invention, wit, historical references, whimsy, bawdiness, and a great richness of image and style, Barth has been described as an “ecologist of information.”
Of his working habits Barth has said that he rises at six in the morning and puts an electric percolator in the kitchen so that during the course of sitting for six hours at his desk he has an excuse for the exercise of walking back and forth from his study to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He speaks of measuring his work not by the day (as Hemingway did) but by the month and the year. “That way you don’t feel so terrible if you put in three days straight without turning up much of anything. You don’t feel blocked.”
This interview, being restricted to a half-hour’s conversation for a television audience, was thought to be a bit short by the usual standards of the magazine. It was assumed that Barth, being such a master of the prolix, would surely make some additions. Extra questions were sent him. The interview was returned to these offices with the questions unanswered, and the text of the interview edited and shortened. Perhaps Barth had not noticed the additional questions. This interview was sent back, this time with a small emolument attached for taking the trouble. The interview was returned once again, along with the uncashed check, with the following statement: “It doesn’t displease me to hear that our interview will be perhaps the shortest one you’ve run. In fact, it’s a bit shorter now than it was before (enclosed). Better not run it by me again!”
INTERVIEWER
When were the first stirrings? When did you actually understand that writing was going to be your profession? Was there a moment?
JOHN BARTH
It seems to happen later in the lives of American writers than Europeans. American boys and girls don’t grow up thinking, “I’m going to be a writer,” the way we’re told Flaubert did; at about age twelve he decided he would be a great French writer and, by George, he turned out to be one. Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default. In my case, I was going to be a musician. Then I found out that while I had an amateur’s flair, I did not have preprofessional talent. So I went on to Johns Hopkins University to find something else to do. There I found myself writing stories—making all the mistakes that new writers usually make. After I had written about a novel’s worth of bad pages, I understood that while I was not doing it well, that was the thing I was going to do. I don’t remember that realization coming as a swoop of insight, or as an exhilarating experience, but as a kind of absolute recognition that for well or for ill, that was the way I was going to spend my life. I had the advantage at Johns Hopkins of a splendid old Spanish poet-teacher, with whom I read Don Quixote. I can’t remember a thing he said about Don Quixote, but old Pedro Salinas, now dead, a refugee from Franco’s Spain, embodied to my innocent, ingenuous eyes, the possibility that a life devoted to the making of sentences and the telling of stories can be dignified and noble. Whether the works have turned out to be dignified and noble is another question, but I think that my experience is not uncommon: You decide to be a violinist, you decide to be a sculptor or a painter, but you find yourself being a novelist.
INTERVIEWER
What was the musical instrument you started out with?
BARTH
I played drums. What I hoped to be eventually was an orchestrator—what in those days was called an arranger. An arranger is a chap who takes someone else’s melody and turns it to his purpose. For better or worse, my career as a novelist has been that of an arranger. My imagination is most at ease with an old literary convention like the epistolary novel, or a classical myth—received melody lines, so to speak, which I then reorchestrate to my purpose.
INTERVIEWER
What’s first when you sit down to begin a novel? Is it the form, as in the epistolary novel, or character, or plot?
BARTH
Different books start in different ways. I sometimes wish that I were the kind of writer who begins with a passionate interest in a character and then, as I’ve heard other writers say, just gives that character elbowroom and sees what he or she wants to do. I’m not that kind of writer. Much more often I start with a shape or form, maybe an image. The floating showboat, for example, which became the central image in The Floating Opera, was a photograph of an actual showboat I remember seeing as a child. It happened to be named Captain Adams’ Original Unparalleled Floating Opera, and when nature, in her heavy-handed way, gives you an image like that, the only honorable thing to do is to make a novel out of it. This may not be the most elevated of approaches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for example, comes to the medium of fiction with a high moral purpose; he wants, literally, to try to change the world through the medium of the novel. I honor and admire that intention, but just as often a great writer will come to his novel with a much less elevated purpose than wanting to undermine the Soviet government. Henry James wanted to write a book in the shape of an hourglass. Flaubert wanted to write a novel about nothing. What I’ve learned is that the muses’ decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose—they will sing or not regardless.
INTERVIEWER
What was in your way that you had to get out of your way?
BARTH
What was in my way? Chekhov makes a remark to his brother, the brother he was always hectoring in letters, “What the aristocrats take for granted, we pay for with our youth.” I had to pay my tuition in literature that way. I came from a fairly unsophisticated family from the rural, southern Eastern Shore of Maryland—which is very “deep South” in its ethos. I went to a mediocre public high school (which I enjoyed), fell into a good university on a scholarship, and then had to learn, from scratch, that civilization existed, that literature had been going on. That kind of innocence is the reverse of the exquisite sophistication with which a writer like Vladimir Nabokov comes to the medium—knowing it already, as if he’s been in on the conversation since it began. Yet the innocence that writers like myself have to overcome, if it doesn’t ruin us altogether, can become a sort of strength. You’re not intimidated by your distinguished predecessors, the great literary dead. You have a chutzpah in your approach to the medium that may carry you through those apprentice days when nobody’s telling you you’re any good because you aren’t yet. Everything is a discovery. I read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn when I was about twenty-five. If I had read it when I was nineteen, I might have been intimidated; the same with Dickens and other great novelists. In my position I remained armed with a kind of “invincible innocence”—I think that’s what the Catholics call it—that with the best of fortune can survive even later experience and sophistication and carry you right to the end of the story.
From the Archive, Issue 95
Interview
Season 4 Trailer
The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.
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